Gender Expectations In Edith Wharton

This literary study will define the historical construction of submissive female gender roles in the domestic sphere in Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Existential Paralysis of Women” and in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. Beauvoir’s article defines the suffering that women endure as servants in the home due to the overarching construction of submissive gender roles in the “masculine world.” This construction of gender role relies on male-based institutions that have educated women to believe that are inferior as an innate biological fact, yet these

Through choice of detail and diction, Edith Wharton justifies Frome’s adultery by juxtaposing the warm, charismatic nature of Mattie to the cold, barren one of Zeena. While his wife speaks in a “monotonous” (129) “flat whine” (32) her cousin’s “suffuse[s] him with joy” (44). Despite the fact that both women are frail and sickly, Zeena’s “puckered throat” and “protruding wrists” (47) disgusts Ethan, while Mattie is so “small and weak-looking that…it wr[i]ng[s] his heart” (106). Throughout the novel, Wharton’s choice of detail drastically contrasts the two women, one a vivacious, vigorous beauty, the other a walking, whining corpse. From their physical looks alone, Zeena is hard to love—sterile and dark—while Mattie—fertile and warm—is easy to. The author intentionally feeds this bias, allowing the readers to feel the same temptation that Frome has in the novel. However, he

Edith Wharton was born in a period of time after the US Civil War in which the population and economy grew at a fast rate, and the wealthy lived fancy lifestyles. This period of time was labeled the Gilded Age by Mark Twain due to its splendid surface but unethical underside. This Period of time was full of cooperate greed, a hike in immigration, and corrupt politics. This era was horrible for the poor, but the rich and powerful benefited. During this time the accepted reasoning was that all women are fragile and helpless. All women were doomed to a career that was marriage, and were expected to live as a housewife. As Edith became an adult, society started to shift, and women were given more freedoms. In 1887, the Married Woman’s Property

The women in this story are dominated by their husbands. They are forced to complete arduous and bland house work all day. In this story the women’s lifestyle after marriage is portrayed as insipid and bleak in comparison to their once vibrant lives. The main theme that ties these tales together is marital oppression.

Every character was created by the author for a purpose. As readers journey through Wharton’s Tales of Men and Ghosts short story collection, they might be inclined to overlook one of the most important aspect: the minor characters, for they hold great significance. Amongst these minor characters are female characters who play plot twisting roles. Through them, Wharton subtly breaches the societal expectations of her time by inserting this concept that women too play an important role in society. In addition, Wharton’s characters refute the haunting words of Queen Victoria: “Let women be what God intended, a helpmate for a man, but with totally different duties and vocations” (Trueman).

For centuries, women have had the role of being the perfect and typical house wife; needs to stay home and watch the kids, cook for husbands, tend to the laundry and chores around the house. In her short story Girl, Jamaica Kincaid give us a long one sentence story about a mother giving specific instructions to her daughter but with one question towards the end, with the daughters mother telling her daughter if she had done all the instructions to become a so called “perfect” woman, what man would not want her. Kincaids structuring in “Girl,” captures a demanding and commanding tone. This short story relates feminist perspectives. The mother expects a great deal from her daughter to have a certain potential and she does not hesitate to let her daughter understand it. As a matter of fact, the story is two pages long, made into one long sentence - and almost the whole time the mother is giving her daughter directions to follow - sends a message to the reader that the mother demands and expects great potential in her daughter. The daughter is forced to listen and learn from what her mother is telling her to do to be the perfect housewife. Throughout the story, Kincaid uses the symbols of house and clothing, benna and food to represent the means of becoming a young girl to a woman and being treated like one in society.

Edith Wharton is “well-known for her portrayal of the moneyed classes of the old New York” in her writings, stories, and novels. The story The Other Two is not the exception. In this story, she portrays what it was to be a woman or what society and men expected them to be. “The point of view in The Other Two is omniscient, although very closely identified with its center of consciousness in Waythorn” (Lewis). Because the story is told from Mr. Waythorn’s point of view, the reader can see the sarcasm and comic side that Wharton likes to use. She describes through this writing style what was the most important thing a woman could offer to society in that time, which was looks and appearances. The Other Two shows the importance that society

“Girl” , a short story written by Jamaica Kincaid, allows the reader a point of view from a strict, demanding mother to a young girl. The structure of “Girl” is displayed in a way that the reader captures the commanding tone the mother unleashes as well as a feministic perspective. This story is of relevance to my childhood growing up in a non-progressive household. Several examples regarding marriage, keeping up a household, and behaving like a lady were highlighted topics in the story as well as my childhood.

Edith Wharton’s novel, House of Mirth, written in 1905 centers around Lily Bart, a single woman in her late twenties, who is constantly struggling to maintain her status in high society. Lily navigates herself through the upper class with a “double consciousness”. This double consciousness enables her to recognize “...that [she] is at the same time inside and outside the ideology of gender; and conscious of being so, conscious of that twofold pull, of that division, that doubled vision” (Carson 695). Throughout the text she is constantly trying to balance a life of being a financially independent woman or the “New Woman” Wharton and her contemporaries added to the female archetypes, but then having to abide in the gender roles that society had established. The limits of her sex contribute to her inevitable failure by the end of the novel but the knowledge of them aided her deconstructing her role as a woman. This “double consciousness” is an advantage since she is able to manipulate the upper class, but the facade she tries to maintain in order to achieve her goal-- financial stability--contributes to her falling victim to the society she tried to configure to her own desires. In this paper, I will argue how the double consciousness of Lily Bart deconstructed the tradition woman to assert the “New Woman”.

Throughout the course of history, the ideals and rights a women must possess have shifted drastically. In the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, women gained more freedoms than they had previously enjoyed. Now, women could work, own their own property, and could rely on their own income for support in family life. This change in women’s rights is mentioned in much of the literature of this time period. While many authors praised women as individual heroines who took the opportunity to pursue their own freedom, there were also many who believed that this shift in ideals left some women battered and ultimately broken. This gloomy concept can be seen in both William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily and Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Through the analysis of these two works, readers can gain a better understanding of the importance of love, marriage, and social status. Indeed, Faulkner presents love as a twisted and confusing term in his cryptic short story.

In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the qualities found in Robert Cohn break traditional gender binary expectations. Robert Cohn’s naive mentality ultimately obstructs his ability to become a man like his fellow companions. Due to his immaturity, Cohn has not yet mentally achieved manhood.

In the beginning of the book, Wharton portrays the conflict between the wife’s desire for wealth and her husband’s illness through the thoughts of the wife and the characterization of a conceited mindset. For instance, the wife displays how she values her own welfare more than her husband when she complains and thinks about the “hardships” she goes through while her husband is going through a life and death situation. This can be seen when the narrator states, “Nobody knew her or cared about her; there was no one to wonder at the good match she had made, or to envy her new dresses” (Wharton 416). The quote places great emphasis on the wife’s tenebrous experience of the temporary stay in Colorado and how she complains about not being able to be ostentatious while her husband is there in order to improve his condition. Also, it shows the author’s pessimistic thoughts when she acquiesces to help ameliorate her husband’s health and how she values her artificial items more than the life of a loved one. Furthermore, in the quote, the connotation “good match” suggests that the wife only married her husband because of his echelon and affluence. This further justifies how women who are totally dependent on their husband becomes egoistic and values the benefits of what the husband yields in rather than his welfare.

The suffrage movement had an enormous influence on Edith Wharton. This impact is made clear in her writings. Edith Wharton had a feminist view on life. “I’m sick of the hypocrisy that would bury alive a woman of her age if her husband prefers to live with harlots” (Wharton 26). Through this quotation, it is made evident that Edith Wharton believed males and females were equals and should be treated as such. “You mustn’t think that a girl knows as little as her parents imagine. One hears and one notices—one has one’s feelings and ideas” (Wharton 96). In this quotation, Edith Wharton shows the controversial idea of women being more than mere objects. Wharton’s works all showcase feminist ideals.

The House of Mirth explores the place of women (particularly Lily Bart) in society and the social effect that marriage had on them. The book showcases the problems that came with being a single woman during the late 1800s and the need and struggle to conform to society's expectations, and, therefore, falls under the title of a novel of manners. Women had little chance to play any role other that a wife or a mother, and could acquire respect and power only through marriage. Edith Wharton explores the themes of the female body, gender roles and manners in order to achieve this.

The feminist theory examines the imbalance between genders within personal relationships and society as a whole. Inequality between the sexes has always been prevalent; however, during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, people began to question the oppression of women and fight for women’s rights. By examining Pride and Prejudice through the feminist lens, it is clear that the patriarchal society of Victorian England “prevented women from realizing their creative possibilities” and caused them to identify as the “‘Other,’ to man as the defining and dominating ‘Subject’” (Appleman 155). In